After 17 years guiding the 14-county diocese, Bishop Paul V. Marshall will lay down his crosier.

Episcopal Bishop Paul V. Marshall, who has guided the Bethlehem diocese for 17 years, has informed the diocesan Standing Committee that he will resign as bishop at the end of the year.

"A number of circumstances and conversations have made it very difficult for me to continue as bishop of the diocese that I have come to love with all my heart," Marshall, 65, said Monday in a letter to the committee.

"I will resign for the canonical reasons of 'advanced age,'" he said.

Marshall said that, on Aug. 1, he will turn ecclesiastical authority over to the Standing Committee, the elected advisory board of the diocese.

Canon Andrew Gerns, Standing Committee president, will consult with Bishop Clayton Matthews, at the Episcopal Church office in New York City, to plan the selection of Marshall's successor.

Neither Marshall nor Gerns could be reached for comment Friday.

Marshall was elected eighth bishop of the Bethlehem Diocese in 1995 and installed in 1996. He succeeded Bishop Mark Dyer, who led the diocese for 12 years before retiring to teach at Virginia Theological Seminary.

Originally ordained a Lutheran minister, Marshall was a pastor and teacher in Minnesota and Wisconsin before he became an Episcopal priest and worked in several New York churches and schools.

"My grandfather was Episcopalian," he said in 1995. "There were very difficult times in late '60s and early '70s for Lutherans. I had to decide what values were important to me, and the Episcopal Church was a home for people of widely divergent views."

The Bethlehem diocese covers a 14-county area of northeastern Pennsylvania, from Berks County and the Lehigh Valley north to the New York border.

"I will move up my long-delayed sabbatical from 2014 to September of this year," Marshall said in his resignation letter, "continuing that terminal sabbatical until I lay down my crosier on December 31, thus giving me time to transition into the last stage of my life."

With the Standing Committee at the helm for the next year, the diocese will have time to collect the funds needed for the election of the next bishop, Marshall said.